I have some older hardware (Pentium II) on which I was trying to bring up X.

I'd installed the latest version of gentoo linux and X.org.  I can't tell if the latest X.org build that gentoo pulls in is really the latest available, because the version numbers seem to use a different numbering system.  "X -version" tells me:

X Window System Version 1.3.0
Release Date: 19 April 2007
X Protocol Version 11, Revision 0, Release 1.3
Build Operating System: UNKNOWN
Current Operating System: Linux localhost 2.6.22-gentoo-r9 #1 SMP Mon Nov 12
02:11:50 CST 2007 i686
Build Date: 12 November 2007

"lspci" reports the video card as:

01:01.0 VGA compatible controller: S3 Inc. Trio 64 3D (rev 01)

When I ran "xorgcfg" to generate the config file, I hit the following error (as reported in /var/log/Xorg.8.log), which crashed X:

Internal error: invalid bpp (32) in S3VScreenInit

I can attach the full log file if anyone wants it.

(I also tried running "xorgcfg" with s3virge uninstalled and the fallback vga driver installed, and ran into a different bug, reported in bug 13238.)

After a few hours poking around on the web, I figured out that I could get X to start by letting "xorgcfg" generate a (broken) xorg.conf, then starting X with that config file and a "-depth 16" parameter.

I was able to puzzle this out because I'm comfortable reading technical jargon, which I had to wade through a lot of to work out a solution.  To someone not technically inclined, it's not at all obvious how to get from that cryptic error message to a working X.  I don't know the right way to address this, but the way it's handled now is broken.